Vital Times 2019 - 4

A Word from the Editor
By Rita Agarwal, MD, FAAP, FASA

2019 has been such a
busy, productive, and
tumultuous year.
Personally, the year started
with the somewhat rapid
and unexpected death of
my beloved father. There is
no question he had lived a full and wonderful life; as
a geophysicist he had an exciting and fulfilling career
exploring for oil; he and my mother had been married
for 59 years and had traveled the world several
times over. Losing him was still very painful. Having
witnessed many deaths over my career, I know that his
passing was as wonderful and peaceful as it could have
been. We were in the hospital, and he was surrounded
by his loved ones. He was comfortable and lucid until
the end. He was able to tell us all how much he loved
us and hear us tell him the same.
As I returned to work and reflected on life and death,
particularly on the days when I was attending on
our inpatient pain service, it helped me focus even
more strongly on the importance of excellent pain
management and dignity in death.1 While the opioid
epidemic accompanied by overdose and death is
a tragedy, denying patients appropriate treatment
and medications and allowing them to suffer is also
not acceptable.2,3 To that end the CSA has been at
the forefront of these issues. Our new opioid videos
and frequent CSA Online First Blog (CSAOF), have
helped establish us as content experts and allow us to
provide the best possible care for our patients.
1 Alyssa Burgart. A Rocky Road for Medical Aid in Dying in California, Vital Times 2018. Pp 85-87.
2 Rita Agarwal. Opioids Pain and Surgery, CSAOF Sept 4 2019

3 Christian Bohringer, The Origins of the Opioid Epidemic, Vital Times 2019

4 | CSA Vital Times

My personal highlights last year were taking over
as the President of the Society for Pediatric Pain
Medicine, a Society I helped found, and putting
together a special session for the American Academy
of Pediatrics: Peds 21 (Pediatrics for the 21st
Century) Opioids Through the Ages. This consisted
of a series of lectures dedicated to describing both
the risks and the benefits of opioids in children and
emphasizing the importance of multi-modal and
multidisciplinary treatment. The video can be found
at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBk_JqZqAYM.

Dave Agarwal in Iran 1961

There were many important issues that the CSA
worked on this year, but probably none as important
to many of our members as the out-of-network

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBk_JqZqAYM

Vital Times 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Vital Times 2019